It’s tempting to think that once you’ve seen one
Zarzuela Gala you’ve seen them all. This one, from a live performance at
Valladolid’s Teatro Calderón, arrives with better credentials than
many. More sumptuously executed than most post-Tamayo efforts, it features
substantially the same “creative team” as the enjoyable
Madrileña bonita. The DVD is well produced, with rich sound and
crisp video, substantial extras, solid authoring and good Spanish/English
subtitling. The illustrated Spanish-only booklet is positively lavish. If the
performers exhibit those glazed eyes and frozen smiles common to
under-rehearsed troopers doing the best they can with hands-on-hips gestural
choreography, DIY characterisation and showy frocks, they certainly get to
perform some real rarities, the most powerful of which is Fernando
Moraleda’s pasodoble on José Román
Muñoz’s lament for the death of the bullfighter Granero.

Bullfighter? Yes. La Fiesta Nacional en La
Zarzuela might be glossed as “Our National Sport in Zarzuela”,
and all’s made clear in the by-line – El mundo de la
tauromaquia en nuestro género lírico (the world of
tauromachia in our lyric genre). Such is originator Julio Doncel
López’s choice of rope upon which to hang his off-centre
string of lyric pearls. Having attended Las Ventas myself earlier this week,
marvelling as matadors “El Juli” and “El Cid” wove
their tauromachial magic in that great cauldron of popular emotion, I thought
this might be a fun idea. The conjunction of toreros and
tenores involves scriptwriter Andrés Amorós in
some contorted pases as he seeks to convince us of the importance of
the corrida in the great zarzuelas: Pan y toros takes a tauromachial
view, certainly, albeit a much more deeply ambiguous one than Amorós
would have us believe. But if the scraping of barrels sounds, it’s
distant enough. This is just a gala after all, and galas being by definition
light exercises in genial nostalgia we should be prepared to swallow most
anything.

So why did this one finally stick in my throat? It’s
nostalgic in spades, but light geniality turns out to be at something of a
premium. As the fiesta proceeds, the smiles turn to grimaces, the hands move
from hips to clenched fists. We end up literally under siege. In common with
many other theatrical pasodobles the stirring Marcha de
Cádiz was formerly played at corridas, for sure; but the work
itself celebrates the lifting of the French siege of the city in 1812, and its
characters are much too busy manning the barricades to bother about
bullfighting. Popularised at the end of the Cuban war in 1898 when national
morale was at a low ebb, Chueca’s march has served as a potent rallying
cry to nationalists ever since. Its political resonance as a final is
crystal clear in today’s Spain, where neo-nationalism is weighing in hard
against the current government’s plan to remove offices and powers from
Madrid to bolster the autonomy of the regions. With its overt homage to
London’s Les Mis, the Marcha as staged makes a defiant
rather than celebratory conclusion to this Fiesta Nacional.

At the barricades: The March from
Cádiz as a Spanish Les Mis.

As an outsider – and this show certainly lets me know that
I am an outsider, although the French come in for even worse treatment
– I ended up feeling under siege myself, and may I hope be forgiven for
brandishing a clenched fist in return. When I first discovered
género lírico music, I was surprised to learn that for
many of Spain’s younger generation “zarzuela” meant
old-fashioned, reactionary and stuffy. Thanks to the imaginative recovery work
of companies such as the Teatro de la Zarzuela and Ópera Cómica
de Madrid, and the scholars of SGAE and ICCMU, that perception has been turned
around. When I visit Madrid now I meet young men and women as enthusiastic
about the past and present of this extraordinary genre as any Spaniards alive,
passionate to use their talents to promote zarzuela’s future at home and
abroad, rightly proud of their nation’s music but ready to laugh off the
dog-in-a-manger surliness of the old regime.

Laughter indeed may be the best response to such gloomy posturing
as we get from this Fiesta Nacional. But there’s another
irritating tic embedded in the show’s by-line: nuestro género
lírico, nuestra zarzuela… “our
zarzuela”. Usually this innocent little idiom has a warm, friendly glow.
How reassuring to find a nation which cares about its arts sufficiently to
nurture and cherish and protect them. A bit of me wishes we could talk about
“our Gilbert and Sullivan” or even “our Lionel
Monckton”, as if we cared. But nuestra zarzuela can say
something else as well. It can say, “this is ours, and ours alone”.
It can say, “only we Spanish can understand, so don’t even bother
to try”. It can even shout, as it repeatedly does in this show,
“zarzuela like Spain belongs to us, so don’t monkey around with
it”. A gala seems a curious vehicle for such an embattled message; but it
comes over loud and clear, not least through María Jesús
Valdés’s hatchet-faced delivery of Amorós’
script.

Nostalgia is a pleasant companion but a bad master.
It’s particularly disconcerting that Julio Doncel López’s
Fundación de la Zarzuela Española has added more than a few old
chairs to this particular barricade. I’ve previously laboured under the
illusion that the Fundación existed to support zarzuela’s march
into the 21st Century, but on this evidence it looks more interested in
dragging it back into the 19th.

Julio Doncel López,President of the Fundaciónde
la Zarzuela Española

I hope I’m wrong; but given its off-the-record indignation
about modern stagecraft, the retro-style content of its luxuriously produced
magazines, and (to judge from zarzuela.net’s email in-tray) its unhelpful
attitude to potential supporters outside Spain, the Fundación de la
Zarzuela Española is behaving increasingly like a dinosaur with bad
toothache. The organisation has impressive fiscal clout and corporate
sophistication. Its theatre histories and illustrated tomes have been a joy.
All the more reason it should establish precisely what it is about, before it
loses the goodwill of younger zarzuela aficionados at home and abroad.
If it genuinely wants to feed the future of “nuestro género
lírico”, it might care to note that this particular
bombón has left a sour taste in at least one hungry mouth.